While all of these content-types provide a great deal of tangible value to a web-page in the way that they increase its complexity and ability to engage incoming traffic, it is important to remember that search engines still do not have sophisticated mechanisms in place for breaking down media-based content into keyword indexes. Because of this caveat, we must be careful to differentiate between the tangible value of media content, and the intangible benefits that come with it.

The first step to valuing images or videos as content is to determine whether it is value-adding or value enhancing. This can be determined by asking ourselves if the media serves as the focal point of the given page, or if it is secondary to a greater article. For example, an article with an embedded within it is still an article. It simply has an image embedded to support the quality of the article. This would be as opposed to a page that consists of one large image (such as an info-graphic) that acts as the main focal-point of the page, and draws a majority of the user’s attention.

In this latter situation, the image would be of much greater worth than the embedded image, simply because of the way in which it serves as a much more valuable contributing factor to the worth of the overall asset. However, because the larger image itself will only be indexed on the basis of its title, alternative text, and caption tags, it is important to remember that the value of this media will be restricted by its contextual relevance. Essentially, the search engines will barely notice it for what it’s worth unless we can make sure that there is some sort of text on the page that is referencing the kind of information it is communicating.

Similarly to the issue of the image not being properly recognized by search engines for its true informational worth, videos are arguably undervalued by search engines. While videos are certainly recognized as improving the quality of the content being provided, they are not necessarily weighted for the kind of information that is being communicated within them, because there is no way to as of yet break down and analyze what is going on within the media itself.

As such, it is important for us to have structured in some sort of contextually relevant text to explain what is going on in the video. Ever notice how it is that music videos on video sites include the full lyrics of the song in the description box? This is exactly what they are trying to accomplish. With that in mind, the next article will describe how it is that we can measure the worth of a piece of rich-media in accordance to its contexts on the page itself.

The first two aspects of social media that create value for an asset as a form of content are similar in the way that they are short strings of text that are relevant to contexts of the page itself. While comments and tweets both differ in application, it is important to recognize their similarities. Essentially, a tweet is a short comment that appears off-page and links in, and a comment is tweet that occurs on page. By simplifying these two forms of content, we can price them at the same general point, with perhaps a slight premium placed on the external tweet to accommodate the potential for viral value.

While the general cost of a tweet can be literally thousands of dollars, the tangible value of such a tweet is anchored in its viral worth (something we will cover later on). As a raw piece of content, the value of a tweet is usually around $0.18-0.25. From there, we can then extrapolate the value to understand how it is that a much more complex Facebook comment could be worth as much as $3-6, and then a full blow shared link on a social media platform, including a comment, would be anywhere from $5-12, depending on the contextual quality of the comment and page surrounding it.

The last thing to take into consideration when valuing Social Media as a content source is its ability to perpetuate its value. Because of the way in which a piece of social content allows other users to comment and share from within the thread itself, a single tweet has the capability of becoming an entire discussion, and a comment has the potential to lead to additional sharing.

This means that each individual piece of social content that is created by a website should therefore be valued as a fixed asset, with the ability to scale independently from the asset itself. We can then determine the ability of this content to scale by measuring its potential for gaining attention, and pricing accordingly within an acceptable price range. Remember, even though every single piece of social content that we acquire has the potential to become a major driver of traffic to our page on its own, we need to remember that we are building a portfolio through these acquisitions, and that the majority of them will simply exist by themselves.

As always, contextual relevance is the major differentiator for these sorts of situations. A contextually relevant social media platform has the potential to have a greater impact than one that is not, and is therefore worth more on its own.

By adding venues for user-based contributions, a website is able to build up its content-base without any explicit effort or cost. This has been taken to the point at which there exist some extremely successful sites that simply have users contribute all of the content that is indexed on the site. Because of the difference in the way which a content-platform creates asset-value in comparison to a traditional article-based website, it is important that we valuate these sites in a way that recognizes their fixed-asset value, and ability to scale.

In general, we can simplify user-contributed content into three main categories. While basic comments have been covered as a content type in the basic valuation article on this page, we can expand on that topic to illustrate how it is that incremental comments add value to a single piece of content. They can be seen as the content-based dividends of a page in the way that they demonstrate the ability of a given piece of content to scale. As comments are added, there is more content on the page to be indexed, and therefore a greater organic traffic implication to the page.

As such, the volume of comments that a given page receives, as well as the rate at which these comments will be added, should be used as the benchmark or discounting the value of the asset. A page that receives a great volume of comments very quickly should have a higher net present value than one that receives many comments over a longer period of time.

Alternatively, a page that receives only a few comments immediately can be seen as being an opportunity for growth, because it suggests that the content is of high-quality, but lacking an exposure base. Because of the popularity of the content, it stands to reason that there is growth-potential in the asset, so long as we are able to increase the content’s exposure to its target audience.

The last thing to take into consideration when looking at comments from a valuation perspective is their ability to re-engage users. While a stream of comments from unique visitors is valuable to a page, repeat comments from the same users should be viewed as exponentially more valuable than one-time comments. Essentially, if a person is returning to the page with the explicit interests of perpetuating a discussion, they are increasing the value of both the asset page itself, as well as their worth as a customer in the way that they are further engaged than just a simple visitor.

As such, it is always a good practice to do a few database (or spreadsheet) inquiries into how many of the visitors are commenting more than once throughout the content base, and whether or not they are engaging in discussions, or simply posting non-contributing comments. From there, we can index for relevance and determine the worth of the content in accordance to a discounting multiple that reflects the true value of the chatter that surrounds a given piece of content as a platform, as opposed to just another article.

By linking in contextually relevant content to on-page articles we are able to achieve a benefit of scale, in that many links can be directed inbound to a single page. The net result is that the on-page content will improve in quality in the eyes of the search engines, and therefore produce a greater amount of organic traffic. The way we do this is by understanding how it is that the Page Rank metric (from Google of course) helps us to value the net benefit of inbound links and their on-page contextual anchoring)

In general, SEO professionals have been able to ball-park the comparative values of different page ranks into a basic PR table. This table illustrates the kind of scale that search engines use to value a PR1 link in comparison to a PR2. In general, this table is summarized as follows:

While this chart serves only as a mathematical demonstration of the comparative values, it provides a useful tool for understanding the difference between each incremental page rank. This essentially means that a single inbound link from a PR10 website is worth almost 10 million times more than a link from a PR1 site. That being said, this does not necessarily mean that the PR10 link is worth $10 million dollars, it simply suggests that the time and effort value of the link is extremely high, to the point at which procuring them could be seen as a competitive advantage.

With these link values in mind, we can then proceed to use a back-link indexing tool to determine what kind of value off-site content is creating for the page. By discounting the value of these inbound links in accordance to a weighted average of their relative value, and then taking into account the value of the keywords that they are referencing into the site, we are then able to determine a tangible value for the value created by the inbound links.

Ideally, we can then identify value-opportunities by looking at the cost-benefit break even of procuring hundreds of cheap links from off-site content, or focusing on developing high-quality links from guest-posts in order to boost page-rank efficiency.

Content

A common saying in the web properties business is that “Content is King”. This saying stems from the fundamental assumption that organic search engine traffic, which has been indirectly generated by carefully engineered content, is the most cost effective mechanism for an asset to generate revenues. Through its consistency and ability to be quantified, organic traffic represents an extremely tangible aspect of fundamental valuation.

This in turn provides us with an outlet for determining the value of the content on our page itself, because of the way in which it directly contributes to the accumulation of organic traffic. Through the analysis of keyword values, the complexity of the content being created, and the sheer volume and velocity of the content being published, we are able to come up with a reliable valuation model for the content present on a website.

1. Valuing Different Kinds of Content

The trick to valuing content from a fundamental perspective is to first determine the cost of how much we would need to spend to actually accumulate the sheer volume and quality of the content that we are seeing both on and off page. In general, we can do this by looking at the costs associated with purchasing this content from professionals, and then comparing this cost to the value of the inbound links that are supporting the page rank.

Ideally, we want to be able to justify the value of the page rank through the cost of procuring the traffic. While there is then some room for discounting the costs in accordance to their ability to create long-term value, we still want to make sure that there is some accountability in the content’s ability to support the tangible value of the page’s PR.

In general, we can break content types down into a few key categories, all of which having reasonably distinct characteristics. While I’m not going to go into the nuances about what differentiates an article from a blog post, I will focus on what makes sales copy worth more than a review article, and why it is that these higher quality content types still need to be discounted due to their high risk.

When looking at this list, it suddenly becomes apparent how it is that the complexity of a piece of content is a major contributing factor to the cost of the content itself. Sales copy is notorious for this, due to its sophisticated styling. Alternatively, informational resources tend to be expensive due to the amount of research that the author will need to put into the piece. This is in comparison to a short-form content-type such as a blog comment or a post, which will generally be intellectually non-intensive, but required in high volume.

For example, hiring out a series of Twitter-tweets will generally require a particular level of supervision to ensure that the platform is properly being engaged. Once all the appropriate individuals have been re-tweeted, tagged, and referenced throughout a conversation, it is possible for a tweet campaign to reach as many words as an entire blog post, simply because of the way in which the campaign managed to engage its audience.

Understanding that the value of the content being produced will represent the fundamental cost-side value of the asset being measured, we need to then evaluate whether or not we will be able to perpetuate traffic (and therefore cash flows) with the information present. This is done by evaluating the value of the page rank, which is supported by inbound links and references.

Number of Words & Length

The numbers of words and length of a domain is important because of the way in which it associates the site itself with a set of keywords, and the way in which the consumer engages the brand that the URL creates. If the name is excessively long, it will generally be worth less than a particularly concise alternative. In the most extreme cases, the value of a single-word domain can extend into the millions of dollars simply because of its effectiveness (ie. Sex.com, one of the most expensive domains ever sold).

Within this section there is also room for related domains to acquire value through plurality. Specifically, a plural domain may take on a greater significance in its ability to attract consumers searching through a syntax that includes a verb, whereas a singular domain might attract a broader range of visitors in the way that the word itself will also be included in the plural search results. Lastly, the addition of numbers after a domain name will decrease the value of the asset, because consumers do not search for keywords as “keyword123”.

Sedo.com 2011 Q4 Domain Market Study

So what kind of value does the market actually place based on the length of a domain name? According to Sedo, a popular domain auction website, enough to create a statistically significant curve. This means that the market most favors domains between 3-13 characters long, and then quickly depreciates the value of those assets afterwards in accordance to a long-tailed distribution.

So how do we take advantage of this trend?

By watching the pros of course! By looking over the top 10 Public Sales of the same report, we can immediately see how it is the domains with only a few words, a reasonable length, and no unnecessary numbering have managed to pull in massive returns over the last year.

View the full Sedo report here.

That being said, who is it that’s making these purchases? And more importantly, how is it that they’re able to distinguish between which website is worth tens of thousands of dollars, and which is worthless? By combining some financial valuation tricks with an understanding of how it is that traffic creates value for a web-page, we can come up with a framework for exactly how to value a website based on tangible worth.

Domain Valuation

Placing a value on a domain is as much of an art as it is a science. That being said, because of the way in which we can tie tangible value to keyword prices, we are able to ascribe value to a domain based on the keyword-specific traffic that it attracts. This method of valuation is effective because of the way in which it takes into account the worth of the traffic that the domain name could bring in from organic search venues. From there, we can use auction platforms to value the kind of premium that the market will place on domain prices.

While there are several resources out there that are providing a list of as many as 14 valuation aspects that can be used to come up with a final price point, it is important to remember that a valuation model needs to be tangible in order to determine the true value of a purchase. As such, I’m only going to be looking at those aspects of valuation that can be concretely measured, and then evaluating the intangible worth of a domain as an aspect of the premium that is placed on similar assets in the auction environment.

Top-Level Domain

While there are a great deal of top-level domains in existence today, it is important to recognize that there is a fairly clear hierarchy associated with which domains are worth more than others. For example, while a .COM domain provides a great deal of worth for a commercial website,.EDU or .GOV domains are considered to carry a great deal of worth in terms of their ability to contribute to Page Rank value. Alternatively, .INFO domains are extremely cheap to purchase, and are therefore heavily associated with unwanted spam and low quality material.

So how exactly do we determine the difference in value between a .COM, .INFO, and .ORG domain? The first strategy would be to start at the source of domain valuation and look at the comparative proportion that is being used by domain registrars at the source. For example, if I search a registrar to find out the price of registering a domain called ‘ugliestcatsever’, I’ll find the following results:

If I put these values into a proportion against the value of the .COM top-level domain, I can begin to see a trend in the basic concept.

Initial Domain Cost Ratios

Notice the pattern? This provides us with a basic valuation framework for discounting the different values for top level domains. However, given this data, we now need to see if the actual data holds up in the auction environment. While the data is a bit more limited, it is fairly easy to access metrics on the valuation of the most popular domains. Interestingly enough, upon evaluation of the sample, we can see precisely how it is that the market values top level domains in comparison to the registrar.

Auction Domain Cost Ratios

The main take-away from this sort of analysis is that there is a small but material difference between the value of a domain at registration, and its price upon resale. Specifically, it would seem as though a .NET or .ORG domain might have a tendency to depreciate in resale value due to its inability to substitute for the recognisability of a .COM, whereas a .INFO or .BIZ seems to actually gain value over time, if it is capable of establishing itself as being something more than a spam haven or content farm.

Next article in this series will be about the length of a domain name.

1. Conversions

Masked affiliate links increase conversions because they look cleaner than raw affiliate links. When you recommend a product with a link, the default affiliate link usually looks something like this:

• www.affiliatesnowlol.com/ref/1038483.htm

That link just looks sketchy. If your visitor hovers his mouse over the link and sees that mess, he is less likely to click on the link. A typical masked affiliate link looks something like this:

• www.mywebsite.com/coolproduct/

The domain is recognizable and the link is descriptive. It looks a lot more “legit” in the eyes of the average computer user. Masking your affiliate links is one of the simplest ways to increase conversions at any website. It doesn’t matter if you run a major online file storage website or a website about handmade bird feeders; masked affiliate links get conversions.

I can remember back when I was a regular web surfer and had no experience whatsoever as an affiliate marketer. I was always skeptical of affiliate links and for some reason, I refused to click on them. Looking back on this, I have no idea why I did this. I just felt like someone was trying to trick me into buying something, so I always opened a new tab and typed the URL in manually.

Now that I know what it’s like on the other side of the fence, I am more than happy to give people credit for a sale if they convince me to try a product. However, I am no longer your typical web visitor. People have naturally become more skeptical thanks to massive scamming, spamming and fraud online.

2. Changing affiliate links

This advantage his huge but I didn’t realize it until I had a 100+ page website and one of my affiliate programs decided to change all affiliate links. This resulted in me having to go through every single page on my website and manually update the link. It was a major waste of time and I’m sure I missed a few links.

If you use a simple redirection plugin (explained below) to mask your affiliate links, you can change every link across your entire site by altering one little link in the backend of your website. The change is instant, easy and does not miss links.

3. Click tracking

Not all affiliate programs offer decent click tracking capabilities. With a redirection in place, you can track how many times your links are clicked. You can also experiment with different links/advertisements by setting up different affiliate links in the backend. That way, you can see which links or ads get the most clicks.

Easiest Way to Mask Affiliate Links

The easiest way to mask affiliate links is to use a simple WordPress plugin called Redirection. All you have to do is install the plugin on your blog, enter your ugly affiliate links and then type in a nice, clean link instead. Whenever someone clicks on your nice pretty link, redirection sends that person on through your affiliate links.

If you don’t have WordPress, you can set up affiliate links manually by editing the .htaccess file in your server’s main public folder. This method is a little riskier because the .htaccess file is something that you don’t want to mess up. However, redirects are not very difficult to set up. First, you’ll need to download the .htaccess file from your server. Then, you need to open it with notepad (not Word).

Add a new line that looks like this:

• Redirect /coolproduct/ http://www.affiliatesnowlol.com/ref/1038483.htm

You can replace “coolproduct” with anything you want. The next part of the link is your actual affiliate links. If you use the above redirect, you can insert the following link:

• http://www.mywebsite.com/coolproduct/

….anywhere you want on your website. Whenever someone clicks on that link, htaccess will automatically redirect that person to the real affiliate link.

This free guest post was written by:
Wes is a full time affiliate marketer who has worked in a wide variety of niches online. His latest and most aggressive project to date is www.onlinefilestorage.com.

Between the rapidly growing user base, the simplicity of the platform’s integration across other social media tools, and the sheer quality of the content that is being created, Pinterest is serving itself up as a fantastic new opportunity for web users to communicate their passions. With such opportunity in mind, let’s dive in to exactly how it is that we can use this tool to build an organic community in a matter of clicks.

What Is Pinterest?

The Pinterest About Page sums up its description the best. “Pinterst lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” Think of it as a social scrapbook for organizing and sharing all the things on the web that fascinate us.

It all starts with a ‘Pin’. A Pin is a single item that a user tacks onto a ‘Board’ that has been specifically customized to hold all of the Pins that pertain to a specific topic. As soon as a Pin hits the Board, the magic begins. Users can search, share, tweet, Re-Pin, and comment on everything that they can easily find on the site.

Not impressed yet? I don’t blame you, it sounds like every other social media craze from the last two years…until you take into account the fact that Pinterest’s growth rate right now is explosive! The platform has increased its user base by 40x over the last six months alone, and Time Magazine is even referencing it as one of the top 5 social media companies of 2011. That being said, the developers behind this project have begun restricting their own growth rate by creating an e-mail waiting list for new applications, just so that they can space out the rate at which people join the new site. As if this site wasn’t cool enough, it’s now exclusive!

How can I use Pinterest?

Pinterest is easy to setup, and even easier to use. Start by getting an account (don’t worry, the waiting list is only for a few days to keep the servers from crashing), and creating a topic board that centers around a specific topic that you are passionate about. Add a few Pins with some clever descriptions and you’re done. It gets even easier when you take into account that there’s a simple plug-in for Google Chrome that lets you Pin things from all over the web, and a Mobile app that lets you do it from the comfort of your IPhone.

Are you already managing a website, and hoping to integrate Pinterest functionality? No problem! Between RSS compatibility and the embedded sharing functionality, you can integrate a Pinterest board with your web-page in as little time as it took you to patch in Twitter.

Who Uses Pinterest?

Simply put, young women use Pinterest, and they use it a lot. Take a look at these Alexa stats:

Now don’t get excited guys, this isn’t a dating site. But those are some pretty confident statistics for an extremely valuable demographic. It’s no wonder that topics surrounding fashion, photography, and aesthetics are the most popular boards right now.

So who is using Pinterest right now to access these demographics? Martha Stewart for one. Martha’s already managed to attract 29,000 followers with only 10 Boards and 108 pins. Alternatively, arts and crafts mogul Etsy has jumped in with over 1,100 Pins spread across 27 Boards. Etsy’s use of the platform leverages the aesthetic appeal of its products to engage its consumer base, while still indicating the commercial nature of all of the items listed through use of the ‘price tag’ feature.

By allowing users to include a price tag to an item, the platform leaves the door open for retailers and independent designers to show off their most viral designs. The Gap has also begun experimenting with this sort of consumer engagement by emphasizing the design elements of its fashion lines. In one of its Boards, the Gap identifies individual lines of clothing with the designer that styled the work in the first place. In another, they draw attention to design enthusiasts that bring the brand to life. Lastly, they include an extremely promising Everything In Denim board that demonstrates the versatility of how a user can draw attention to their brand, without simply listing products and prices.

How to Benefit Most from Pinterest

Looking at how it is Pinterest is coming along as a community, there are some obvious best practice trends emerging that indicate how users should contribute for the most impact.

• Specificity: As with most search-based platforms, specificity is key. Make sure to organize content in a way that focuses on a single topic, so that users know exactly what they’ll be signing up for if they follow you. Think of Pinterest as providing you with an opportunity to further build upon your role as an expert in a given niche.
• Visual Emphasis: Pinterest lends itself mainly to visually pleasing content. The Pins themselves are centered around an image, and thus we can see how it is that infographics, photography, and fashion have all taken first precedent as the most popular topics. Make sure that your Pins look good.
• Content Amplification: By the time you’ve got a Pinterest account, you’ve already got a Facebook page and a Twitter page. Take advantage of the synergies and link them together. Communicate updates across all of the platforms, and try to use your existing presence to suck in more followers.
• Drive Traffic: At the end of the day, it all comes down to driving traffic to some destination. While Pinterest serves more as a discovery platform than a referral engine, it can still act as a powerful tool for building awareness. Take advantage of your creative pins by including a call-to-action in the description box. Even the addition of a price tag is an effective mechanism for subtly suggesting there’s more to be had at a homepage.

Pinterest Strategies

Need some inspiration for your latest Board? Think about your passions, take a look around at what other people are doing, and then consider the following as a list of possibilities for going viral:

• Online Cataloging: That’s the obvious one, but it’s effective.
• User-Generated Content Boards: User generated content is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Let people use your board as a way to submit their own contributions with similar topics. Want an aggressively simple example? Think Memes.
• Event Management: Events are dynamic and exciting, which is why they’re perfect for Pinterest. Preview pics, guest profiles, and count-down boards are all in play for event profiles.
• Product Launch: Looking at getting some initial traction on that basement project? Get a Board going and start getting feedback. Engage your potential user base with bios of the staff, functionality Pins, and suggestion boxes.
• Discounting: Pins are almost eerily coupon-sized. Time to load up that Groupon RSS feed.
• Contests: “Pin-To-Win” contests are a fantastic opportunity to build a follower base, and to generate some viral buzz about an offering.
• Media Aggregation: Take advantage of the aggregation functionality of the RSS feature. Pinterest makes organizing Youtube videos a breeze, or juggles a photo gallery into an easy-to-read catalogue in seconds.

Optimizing Pinterest for SEO

As a link-building tool, Pinterest has some pretty valuable features. Firstly, there’s the ease with which a user can simply share a Pin. From there, we can see just how valuable the social aspect of the platform can be when we realize that every single Pin, no matter how many times it is Re-Pinned, always maintains its original link that points back to its originating location. This means that every time your Pin is shared, you get another back-link to your main page. Best of all, these are full-fledged do-follow links, meaning that you get all the link-juice of Pinterest supporting your page for every time that a user shares one of your links. From there, we simply need to follow the standard best-practices for building quality social media backlinks.

For starters, make sure that specific Boards and about pages referring to your profile are keyword specific. From there, be sure to build up the quality of the links from the Pinterest page itself by using an existing description page from an outside URL as your ‘business url’. Lastly, integrate your boards with your other communications platforms as frequently as possible. Facebook feeds, Twitter posts, and blog posts all help to support a strong traffic source for your target page to leverage.

Conclusion

If you haven’t been keeping track of the social media trends yet, let me sum it up for you: this is it. Pinterest is building up a massive community of content-focused users that are looking for anything new and exciting that’s close to their interests. Between the sociability, scalability, and sheer ease of use of this platform, I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of this product to come in the future.

You’re tired of spending money on useless eBooks and courses that never get you anywhere. You spend hours searching the Internet for the holy grail that’s going to make you rockstar rich. I bet you’re even on those marketing forums trying to get advice.

Well stop fooling yourself it’s not going to be that easy and hanging out at digitalpoint forum is only rotting your brain. No I’m not a mind reader just someone who use to be in your shoes.

The best decision I ever made if my life was to stop spending money on crap, got off those useless forums and got FOCUSED!

The only thing holding you back from realizing your dreams is prying the information away from me. Just kidding I’m actually going to give you the opportunity to access the information that makes me WAY over 100k month for FREE.

Still not sure? Just read this page, fill in the form and it will all make sense.